1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information storage device capable of reading and writing information thereon in a wireless manner, a scanner and an information storage and reproducing apparatus incorporating the information storage device and the scanner.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computer-based electronic management systems are today in widespread use in a diversity of application fields. In the management of products, for example, each product is associated with a label bearing a known bar code that designates its model name, date of manufacture, lot number and the like, and a computer is used to manage the product history and other related data. Magnetic cards are used as membership cards for a variety of clubs and credit cards, in which required information is stored in the magnetic cards to manage the information about their users.
In the product management that employs the known bar code, however, managing the product history for each product on an individual basis is difficult. Namely, it is difficult to tag each individual product with its bar code for identifying it. Even if such an identifying bar code can be attached to the product, encoding its product history information into its bar code and attaching it to the product is very difficult, if not impossible. To manage each product on an individual basis, therefore, a host computer must store history information of each product, and entry of such individual information is time-consuming. Furthermore, the bar code labels attached to the products naturally age, sometimes to the extent that the bar code is illegible.
When the information of the users is managed using the magnetic cards, the magnetic card age and thus have to be periodically renewed.